Tag Archives: public schools

Ignorance is strength

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by Education, Media, politics • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

How can every human being on the planet not spend their days being puzzled about pretty much everything?

Every day I ask myself questions like: How does that work? Why did that happen? Who was responsible for that? What was the purpose of that? Where did that come from? Constantly, one or more of the interrogatives – Who? What? Why? Where? When? – applied to the natural, political, built, mechanical, social worlds.

Can never remember a time when I wasn’t curious, puzzled, interested about the world around me. All children are I thought. But it seems many adults lose the curiosity. Seem to settle for a quiet intellectual life in which people they believe are authority figures tell them how things are, the way they are going to be, and they accept the propositions as given.

How else can you explain the willingness of the 99% to vote, in spite of conservative failures over 50 years or more, against their interests and elect neoconservative governments? How else can you explain the lack of action on climate change? How else explain the successful campaigns by rich miners (originally a typo almost had them as rich moners), by alcohol sellers, poker machine makers and clubs, developers, fishermen.

How else too can you explain the following of fundamentalist religions, of fake medical “cures” like homeopathy and naturopathy, of faith healers and “psychics”, of get rich quick schemes, of populist politicians.

And how else explain why we, the people, accept incuriously what the mainstream media tells us, asking no questions so told all lies. No one it seems is puzzled when they are told one thing one day, the opposite thing the next day; or when told about two identical actions by two political leaders, one of which is great the other abhorrent.

No one is puzzled when the ‘reasons’ given for starting a war turn out to be completely spurious; when behaviour said to be perfectly safe turns out disastrous; no one is puzzled that “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia”; no one thinks it odd that “The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation”.

Oh yes, quoting Orwell is so 1980s isn’t it? But it seems increasingly that not only are political parties and whole countries using it as a manual for controlling and manipulating the public, but so are the media. Think of just three aspects. Winston Smith’s job involves dealing with “unpersons”, people now deemed politically embarrassing, so he alters records, changes photographs, to ensure that the person has not just disappeared from modern awareness, but from history as well. Then, to fill a gap where the unperson once appeared he invents “Comrade Ogilvy, a fictional party member, who displayed great heroism by leaping into the sea from a helicopter so that the dispatches he was carrying would not fall into enemy hands”.

Finally of course the idea of our tv screens watching us hasn’t happened (although …), but the tabloid press tapping phones, going through rubbish bins, and governments using spy satellites and getting internet records means the sense of privacy, lost in “1984″, is rapidly being lost here.

Inner Party member O’Brien says that in the future “There will be no curiosity”. And he is right. The public it seems now have no curiosity. And therefore the media can create a fictional narrative, an alternative to reality, that people will simply accept as truth. And in that reality they will also accept what conservative political leaders tell them.

So, I hear you ask, what is the answer?

Well, you don’t need me to tell you, the answer is “education” of course, teach kids to question, not rote learn, to be curious … oh, sorry, no, can’t keep that up.

Do you think the Inner Party doesn’t know that? Why else have preschools been privatised, religious and other private schools been massively funded, public schools and teachers constantly attacked, demands always made for more “3 Rs” (plus trade courses) to be taught and none of this “contentious” stuff about climate change or politics, ethics classes attacked and religious ones (with “chaplains”) encouraged, all attempts to encourage thinking slammed as being brain washing by the Left? Why the call for kids to leave school early and get jobs? Why the determined defunding of universities, the encouragement to teach more business courses and less “Arts”, the push for private paying students, the defunding of student unions, the constant attacks on any political involvement by students, the constant attacks on university lecturers for being Left Wing?

The 1960s and 70s gave the Inner Party a big shock. This is what happens when children are taught to think in school and university and they were having no more of that. So they have thrashed the curiosity out of education (with the willing acquiescence of the Labor Party, also not keen to see too much curiosity about its own policies and behaviour).

So no, I don’t have an answer. Anyone for a job in the Ministry of Truth? Plenty available.

A little learning

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by Education • Tags: , , , ,

When I was a young fellow, turned 14, the minimum age at which you could leave school, people demanded of my mother that I leave school, get a job, support the family. Fair enough. No one in the family had ever, for financial reasons, stayed at school past that age. And it was what people like us did, Just the way things were. There were the elites who finished school, went to university, became professionals; and there were the not-so-elites who left school early, got an unskilled job or an apprenticeship, became working class. Generation after generation of Australians, same pattern, just as it had been, and remained, the pattern in England on which our education ideas were based.

But my mother refused to listen, with some hardship kept me at school, then to university, and the rest, as they say, was history. I wasn’t alone. Robert Menzies was building high schools, training teachers, instituting scholarships for universities. Later Whitlam added to the process by building universities and making them free to all. My classes at schools in the late 50s early 60s were a mix of students from rich professional families to the poor ones like mine. If you had ability, drive, determination, you were no longer restricted by where you had come from. And we repaid the investment, students in my final high school class went on to be doctors, teachers, scientists, pharmacists, engineers, adding value to Australia.

I was reminded of all this again the other day when a politician called for essentially a return to the 1950s. Tony Abbott said “The other point I want to make is that it’s all very well keeping kids at school past year 10 but they’ve got to be the right kids being kept at school past year 10” he told radio 2UE. A return to elitism in education. A return to poor students dropping out early, rich students going on. To a view of university as being a playground for the elites, not a training ground for all. Nor a place where a well-educated population could be produced. Places of thought, discussion, debate, discovery.

Oh, it hasn’t been ideal since the increase in fee-paying students from overseas, or the dropping of less popular courses and the increase in courses to do with business for example. But the school part of the equation was continuing to ensure some equality of opportunity.

Curious that when we had a system that worked so well, that contributed to the egalitarian ideals of Australia (a dangerous thing perhaps?), that made best use of all the talents and abilities of its young people, we should have someone calling for a return to the bad old days.

Can’t have been well-educated, I guess.

Or doesn’t believe in a fair go, a fair opportunity, for all.

Count me in

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by politics • Tags: , , , , ,

Australian Census Day has come again (can it really be five years since the last one?). People complain about having to fill in a form, just as they complain about having to vote, but I enjoy it (although given my somewhat unusual history and circumstances some questions make me pause to think). In fact I reckon Census Day could be declared a national holiday, along with a [once fixed] federal election day, celebrations of our democratic processes.

In America there are people who complain about the very existence of a census, based on some strange libertarian idea that even letting people know you exist is an infringement of “freedom”, and here there were some strange mutterings and email campaigns about the implications of the religion question. I never understand what libertarians or religious fundamentalists are saying about any question, and the census is no exception.

The Census people always promote the census as a practical thing – providing data about education, age distribution, health care, economics, business activity, home ownership, population distribution and so on, that governments can act upon. Fair enough, all true, and something that people can accept as a reason for undertaking the terrible burden of spending five minutes filling in a form every 5 years. But I think there are a couple of other more intangible reasons.

One is just the communal aspect of the endeavour. Here we are 22 million Australians, from all walks of life, all parts of the country (isolated outback farms and city units), all ages, conditions, origins, all sitting down equally to record where we are up to in 2011. Our collective efforts, our collective stories, our various circumstances, combine to say “Here we are, we are Australians, the census results providing a fingerprint, a DNA for a country, that is uniquely that of this great southern land. Indeed it is I think a pity that the questions don’t include more about our interests in the Arts, Sport, hobbies, entertainment, and so on, the things that collectively make us even more Australian.

The other reason in fact is a matter for regret. Engaged as I have been intermittently for some time on tracing my family history my search became enormously easier as the British census returns came on line (the result mainly of volunteers, including me, transcribing them for each county). Britain has been conducting the census from 1841 (in a limited way, 1851 is the first really detailed one) every ten years. And having kept all the returns safely locked away for 100 years, so that the privacy of no living person can be invaded, has been steadily releasing them. The returns for 1911 have just become available I think. It is no exaggeration to say that you can’t effectively do family history without this census information, and conversely that it is fascinating to watch your family change through each decade of the nineteenth century (click the “Dream” tab above to read the results of my research). Can’t do it in Australia. Partly because there was no country-wide census until 1911, but also because the individual returns were destroyed. Not until 2006 was there the option of saying you were happy for your return to be kept for 100 years and then released, and only half the population agreed. A great loss to our collective and individual sense of history – count on it.

Having a laugh

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by politics • Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Barry O’Farrell (Premier of New South Wales) is now under pressure it seems from both the far right (Fred Nile and the Shooters) and the right (federal minister Martin Ferguson). The Shooters and Fishers have already put a stop to protecting marine life (a ten year moratorium not just 5 years as I thought when I wrote about this before) and have begun putting on pressure to see every child in the state armed to the teeth and shooting guns at school. Fred Nile is said to have had a chat with Barry demanding that all teachers in public schools be replaced with chaplains approved by him (Fred), and that there be none of this teaching of “ethics” which apparently is incompatible with religion. Now Martin is demanding that NSW end all resistance and have every part of the state explored for uranium deposits, so Barry is faced with three demands all of which would have toxic legacies for generations to come for the citizens of this proud state.

I am reminded of a comedy sketch I saw years ago, the comedian now forgotten (see comments), in which Walter Raleigh comes back from America having discovered tobacco and is trying to sell its benefits to the British government whose response is incredulous – “And then they do what Walter? They stick this tube of paper full of leaves of a nasty weed into their mouths and then they set fire to it? Right, we’ll give that a miss Walt, thanks for asking.”

Just as well I ‘m not Premier, because I wouldn’t have been able to keep a straight face as these similar propositions were paraded through my office by apparently serious people. “Really, armed schoolchildren learning fundamentalist religion with no ethics whose job prospects are in uranium mining, in a state whose environment is being wrecked? Sorry, that’s a bit of a cough I have developed, my secretary will show you out, don’t call us we’ll call you.” But I am sure Barry, a much nicer and more polite man than me, will have listened to all this nonsense attentively, taken notes without laughing, and politely seen them to the door. Ushered in the next lot of ideologues demanding cattle in high country, the sale of all public assets, an increase in tree clearing, private operators in National Parks, and the destruction of the union movement in the state.

There seems to be a view from some political commentators, far less astute than yours truly, that you have to do deals with all these mad-brained people in order to get through your own agenda, which I had understood to mean catching up on years of neglect by the Labor Party (hampered by its own right wing nutters) of areas such as infrastructure, transport, hospitals, schools. Are these people beating a path to your door really going to block you on these electorally popular moves if you don’t go along with their hare-brained agendas? What if you were to discuss stuff with Labor and the Greens and isolate Mr Nile and friends in their own little world? I reckon you are a smart enough politician to rack up achievements in the next four years without giving the state a terrible case of addiction to crazy ideology with endless harmful effects. Good start with standing firm on ethics.

But do try to keep a straight face.

Never did me any harm

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by Education, Media • Tags: , , , , ,

The other day I heard the usual glib discussion of “discipline in schools” on some tv channel. About how terrible it was that teachers these days were subject to violence (certainly any violence against teachers is terrible, but as an aside I think there is a convenient forgetting about history here, as is so often the case. “Blackboard Jungle”, after all, was written in 1954, and there must have been many examples of teachers being treated badly in even earlier times) and how we needed to bring back strong discipline which had been lost as a result of “political correctness”.

But this view of “spare the rod and spoil the child”, “bring back the cane”, “they need a damn good thrashing”, “never did me any harm”, and the like are themselves “political correctness”. It is just that they are the politically correct thoughts of the Right, the authoritarian, the shock jock, the populist politician.

Every time “political correctness” is supposedly being attacked, what is happening is that someone of the conservative side of politics is trying to remove some socially or environmentally aware policy and replace it with a neoconservative one.

At various times in the past it has been politically correct to: burn old ladies as witches; kill bulls and bears with dogs for entertainment; have schoolmasters and fathers beat children senseless with sticks, belt, anything they could lay their hands on; hang people for all kinds of small and large crimes in public; invade resource rich countries owned by brown people who didn’t deserve them (oh, sorry, still with us); insult refugees/migrants by calling them names like wog and reffo, or indeed, in the case of Chinese, slaughtering them; keep women barefoot and pregnant and certainly not voting or owning property; smash down huge areas of trees with chain and be rewarded by being made state premier; kill koalas for fur, birds of paradise for feathers; take land away from Aborigines without compensation, kill many of them, refer to the remainder as Abos and boongs, while chuckling over newspaper cartoons whose joke depended on Aboriginal stupidity; have sex with women while drunk with no reference to consent; drive while drunk; have small children working in factories and mines and chimneys; have black people working as slaves; condemn people to nasty deaths for “blasphemy” against whatever the currently popular imaginary figure in the sky was; ensure that the great majority of the workforce worked very long hours in dangerous or damaging conditions for poor wages; see the mentally ill and disabled treated with scorn and contempt, mental asylums as places for public entertainment, “freak shows” in circuses; see single mothers socially and economically destroyed, their children removed, children of poor families shipped to colonies; see old people end lives in workhouses.

OK, that’s enough, you have got the idea. Those and many more similar concepts were the political correctness of their day. Many are still the political correctness of the kind of people who vote for conservatives against their own economic and social interests. When John Howard railed against “political correctness” he was representing the views of people who were outraged that they could no longer do and say some or all of those things, they having been replaced by approaches and ideas more relevant to a 21st century sensibility and knowledge than an 11th century one.

So it isn’t “political correctness” that stops children being beaten senseless in schools or homes, it is a recognition that the old political correctness that thought such behaviour was normal was wrong and extremely damaging. You want to argue a case for bringing back the birch or the hangman, open sexism and racism? Go for it, (if you are not a shock jock, in which case you have already reverted to the politically correct language of 1111), convince the public you are right. But don’t hide behind the political euphemism that the only reason we don’t behave like that is because of political correctness on the Left.

I think when you do make the argument you will find that the public in general don’t want a return to the political correctness of the dark ages. You might also find that if you are genuinely concerned about violence in classroom and playground, and not just playing jolly media games, that a very fertile ground of investigation would be the role of the media itself in influencing the attitudes of children to violence and to other people.

But maybe I am just too politically correct – should have been beaten when I was a child.

Apples for the teachers

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by Education, politics • Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Heard both another politician and Rupert Murdoch calling for “educational reform” the other day and shuddered. It will always turn out to be not reform in the sense of making things better for children and teachers, the sort of thing us ordinary mortals mean when we talk about reform. Instead it will turn out to be based on the reform caller’s own school experience (little Latin and less Greek) which will have equipped them to be an education expert; or on some right-wing ideology hell-bent on turning schools into factories (profit-generating-factories) for producing good consumers and workers. Out will come gimmicks like NAPLAN, My School website, performance pay, vouchers, none of which will do anything except make our education system, once pretty damn good, worse and worse.

We might instead, if we were serious about actual, you know, reform, turn to other countries to assess their experiences in order to see which things have failed (all the list above) and what really works. Which brings me to Finland. That surprised you didn’t it? Top of the international education league tables for most of a decade. Students clamouring to get into university teacher courses. Massive numbers of applications for every teaching job. How do they do it?

All teachers have to have a Master’s degree, so teaching is equivalent in prestige to law and medicine. The highest-flying youngsters then started flocking to the profession because of its new-found prestige. Schooling is free (including free university education) and compulsory for all. No selection of pupils for individual schools. No school uniforms, and informal relations between students and teachers. No inspections of teachers (“They are academics and well-trained, so we trust them”), no national testing of pupils. Class sizes small (maximum 20 in first 2 years of high school for example). Pupils transfer to either an academic or a vocational school at the age of 16 after nine years of compulsory schooling.

The only part I disagree with is that because it is illegal to charge fees in the Finnish education system, even those schools that are run privately take their funding from the state. Hmmm!

But generally speaking the key seems to be to raise the prestige and training of teachers and then trust them to get on with the job.

Actually a prescription for success in most work places I suppose.

Time for the ideologues to back away from education. Julia and Kevin could visit Finland (as many education ministers from around the world are doing, most recently England’s Education minister) to see for themselves how the Finns have done it. Mind you they would want to be quiet and listen. I have a feeling in my chalk that the Finns would be stunned and disgusted by the “reforms” to education undertaken here in recent years by both sides of politics.

The ragged trousered philanthropist

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by Climate Change, Economics, Education, Environment, Media, politics • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Because I am a philanthropist, in words if not finances, can I offer a couple of free suggestions to Julia Gillard and the Labor Party. I mean you are doing about as well as Gordon Brown just before the Cameron landslide, or John Howard before the Kevin Rudd one. Sorry, that was a bit mean-spirited – how about Malcolm Fraser before the Hawke deluge?

Anyway, suggestion one. Julia, call Bob Brown, apologise. Arrange to meet for dinner. He is a charming dinner companion you will get on well. Say that you recognise, now, that Greens are normal human beings who have jobs, families, and values very similar (I’m guessing, and we’ll come to that) to your own. That having, belatedly, read some Australian Labor Party history, you recognise, now, that in many ways the Greens represent the Labor Party of Chifley and Curtin, of Whitlam and Cairns. That the Labor party has lost what was once its progressive wing in the way that it once lost its regressive wing (the DLP) and is suffering for it. That you understand that while there are disagreements between Labor and the Greens in relation to the importance of environmental issues and one or two others, these are not insurmountable. That you would like therefore to see a formal coalition (joint party room, shared ministries), in government, between the two parties, in the way that the Liberals and Nationals, facing similar policy agreements and disagreements, have successfully managed for over half a century. That you realise that there will be objections within both parties, at elected and grass-roots levels, but that with goodwill this should be something that two social democratic parties should be able to overcome. The alternative being another long-lasting Liberal/National coalition government led by the most regressive members of that coalition and creating an Australia anathema to both Labor and Green parties. All elections are critical, but the next one is arguably the most critical ever seen for the future of this country and planet, and we no longer have the luxury of the two left-wing parties of Australian politics slagging each other off more than they do the real political enemy.

Right, that’s the structural thing out of the way, and it is a biggie.

Now, you yourself Julia. I know everyone has had a go at your style of public speaking (just between you and me I have been known to yell in despair at the TV – “no, don’t say it like that Julia, don’t say that” – the most recent example was when you responded to Malcolm Turnbull’s thoughtful interview on climate change as follows “Malcolm Turnbull told us the truth. He told us the truth that basically this plan won’t work. He told us the truth that it would blow the budget.” – that kind of repetition, and negativity, is what drives people like me to despair) but that isn’t much use without something positive to suggest. And telling you to change the style (I’m guessing) you have had since high school doesn’t get either of us very far. So here is a positive suggestion, and a bit more Labor history (in a very broad sense). According to Wiki “President Franklin Roosevelt first used “fireside chats” in 1929 during his first term as Governor of New York. He faced a conservative Republican legislature so during each legislative session he would occasionally address the citizens of New York directly. He appealed to them for help getting his agenda passed. Letters would pour in following each of these “chats,” which helped pressure legislators to pass measures Roosevelt had proposed. He began making the informal addresses as President on March 12, 1933, during the Great Depression“. These “informal” chats came to be called “fireside chats”, not sure why, partly I think because his audience were sitting around the fireside listening to the radio, partly because the illusion they presented was that Roosevelt himself was sitting by the fire in the White House, in a comfortable chair, talking personally, as to a hundred million friends, about the important issues he and they were concerned with (the Depression in general, and then the War).

Again turning to Wiki for an explanation of the success of these chats (Roosevelt would receive millions of letters in response to each one):
“Rhetorical Manner
Sometimes beginning his talks with “Good evening, friends”, Roosevelt urged listeners to have faith in the banks and to support his New Deal measures. The “fireside chats” were considered enormously successful and attracted more listeners than the most popular radio shows during the “Golden Age of Radio.” Roosevelt continued his broadcasts into the 1940s, as Americans turned their attention to World War II. Roosevelt’s first fireside chat was March 12, 1933, which marked the beginning of a series of 30 radio broadcasts to the American people reassuring them the nation was going to recover and shared his hopes and plans for the country. The chats ranged from fifteen to forty-five minutes and eighty percent of the words used were in the one thousand most commonly used words in the English dictionary.
Where Roosevelt’s Simplicity and Clarity Come from?
When Roosevelt was doing his chats he wanted them to be simplistic and clear. He wanted to be clear enough for his audience to understand what he was saying because it was important to him. He came up with three techniques to make his chats clear and simple. First, he wanted easy to read and open language use. Second, he wanted to include many concrete examples and explanations into his text. Third, he wanted simple organization in his text.
How did he make his chats persuasive?
There were four tips that Roosevelt used to persuade his audience when he gave his chats. The first was he used the word “We” when he made claims. He wanted the audience to feel like they were a part of the chats. Second, he embedded his claims into objective statements. Third, he used a lot of adverbs and adjectives. Finally, he made his language go from soft to hard. Slowly draw his listeners in and hit them hard later on.

Memorise those tips Julia, make them a part of your being. I want you to start “fireside chats” to the nation. Literally, sit by a fire in the Lodge in a comfortable chair, having had a nice dinner, couple glasses red wine, and now a beautifully made fresh pot of coffee ready to pour your first cup. Just a single camera there, and you start talking through it (not to it as you usually do), forgetting it is there at all, to the people of Australia, to all your friends, as if they were sitting in the other comfortable chair with a cup of coffee. You speak softly and quietly and warmly, as you are just talking to your friend. And what do you talk about? Well, this is just as important as the ambience. You will talk about the “Why” of what you are doing. Not the “what” and the “how” and the “when” and the “how much” and how you are being blocked by the Opposition. There is no opposition in the room, just you and your friend.

Explain the “Why” of a Carbon Tax in relation to global warming, the why of plain packaging of cigarettes, the why of improving conditions for workers, the why of health reform, the why of mining resources taxes, the why of improving education, the why of saving the Murray and old growth forest, why infrastructure like the National Broadband Network is important, and so on. Let your own ideas, and those of your Green partners, flow out to explain clearly and simply to the people why these policies are important. In doing so you will, as Roosevelt intended, bypass the vicious spin of the Murdoch Press and the shock jocks and you will communicate directly to your friends the Australian people. And if they understand the why they will understand the reasons in a way that the dull recitations of what and how doesn’t do (this was the mistake Kevin made too). So you will bring them with you instead of letting them be alienated. And it will serve another purpose too – you will also start to consider more fully the why of existing policies, and some of those might be changed as a result (think refugees, think gay marriage, think free trade). And when they are changed to something more reflecting your social democrat ideals you will then in turn be able to let the public see the reason for the new policy, the “Why” behind your change of mind.

Oh you won’t win them all, in some cases the public will disagree with your “Why”.

But at the moment you aren’t winning any of them.

Feel free, adopt both ideas, quickly. No gratitude needed, say they were your ideas. I’ll keep shtum, just the warm glow of a job well done is enough for this philanthropist.

Or are they just the products of a fevered brow (nah, not so fevered today), or somewhat ragged trousers?

Oh Maggie I wish …

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by Economics, politics • Tags: , , , , , , , ,

When Maggie Thatcher announced her doctrine that there was no such thing as society, just millions of people selfishly doing their own thing and corporations ever expanding their profits, it would have been hard to imagine, like the shot heard around the world, her views ever being of relevance in the Yass River Valley. But she was listened to, first by the Hawke-Keating government and then by the Howard one, and the chickens are coming home to roost. Turns out that kind of thatcherite ideology, soon adopted everywhere, hurts everyone except the super rich, but hurts small rural communities the most. If Corporations are only required to make ever bigger profits (no society, remember); if all public services are privatised, turned into corporations; if all regulations are removed, or turned into “self-regulation”; if functions are outsourced overseas; if mergers are encouraged; then we will see happening what has been happening. The obvious place to make big profits – because of big markets, high volumes, short distances, available infrastructure, rich customers – is the city. The places where profits are low and costs are relatively high – those places where you would cut services in order to cut costs and raise profits – are small country towns and villages.

And so private companies cut services in country areas, as do newly-privatised once publicly-owned companies, as do publicly-owned companies next on some government’s list to be privatised, as do government entities starved of funds because of the endless thatcher-inspired reductions in tax revenues. Thatcher’s belief in there being no such thing as society was not so much a description as a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the trend continues, and it seems likely to, then the public will own nothing at all. But that is the future. In the past and present we have seen banks closing branches in small country towns, railway stations and lines closed, Telstra reducing its presence and service in country areas, hospitals closing wards or all together, public schools closing, councils amalgamating.

And now it seems to be the turn of Australia Post. Well, has been for some time I think, as post offices began to look more like supermarkets than a government service, and as actual country post offices began to close and be replaced by the provision of post office facilities in general stores, matching what had long been the case in the smaller villages. And now in turn those facilities are beginning to close, apparently because the way that Australia Post pays for the provision of these services hasn’t kept pace with costs. Hasn’t kept pace with, makes no allowance for, increases in volume in some items, especially parcels. And all of this means, I am told, that the provision of this essential community service is being subsidised not by Australia Post (our public postal service) but by many of the small shopkeepers themselves. Who are, in many cases, already struggling to cope with competition from giant supermarket chains in regional centres. If the post office, such a central facility for every village, closes down, what is left of the community itself? Does it become just a place where people sleep at night, going elsewhere by car during the day to work, to school, to shop, seek medical treatment, to undertake postal and banking operations? Is that a community, and if it is then why would people want to move from towns to live in it? Once upon a time governments were anxious to encourage people to move from city to country – perhaps they still are, but the gradual loss of services will make this a forlorn hope.

I suspect that Australia Post may well be on a Gillard list for privatisation, and it is currently clearing the decks, improving the profitability, ready for that blessed event. If it isn’t it will certainly be high on the agenda of an Abbott government. Once it is privatised there is absolutely no doubt that the service provision will get even worse in the country as more cost cutting measures come in. All of this stuff keeps happening gradually (just as with climate change) and like the proverbial frog in gradually heating water we don’t notice until it is too late and we look around and say “whatever happened to this community?” If you have a post office in a local store have a chat to the store owner, see how he or she is going, ask whether you should protest and to whom. Like many such things, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone – get in first this time.

It’s a pity that the price of maintaining some fragment of services in country areas is eternal vigilance.

I blame Maggie – decisions of leaders whose eyes shine with the white hot heat of ideology, made in oak panelled rooms to the applause of corporate leaders, have a way of impacting on those communities and individuals who can least afford it half a world away.

Heads up

by Education • Tags: , , ,

Two stories coincided the other day on a television breakfast show. The first was in response to the increase in cigarette prices that had occurred the night before. People had been rushing to stock up, rather in the way one might stock up on cyanide or guns I suppose. And there had been an “online poll” in which two thirds of the responders said they wouldn’t give up smoking as a result of the price rise, one third said they would. This was trumpeted by the presenters as “Most smokers won’t give up as a result of price rise, is it therefore just a grab for money?”. The second story was to do with the school testing program for the “My School” league tables. One presenter said that teachers were currently preparing children to take the test. One of the shock jocks, outraged at the prospect that “a few” teachers wanted to resist this absolutely perfect capitalist experiment in public education, expressed surprise at this, noting that the tests should just be a quick unprepared sample of every day school life. And then a day or so later came news that poorly performing students were being told to stay home on the day of the test. It is not a random test which can reflect reality, it is a test whose results are biased in all kinds of different ways, which is why teachers are objecting to it being used to COMPARE SCHOOLS.

I have yet to hear a tv commentator who understands this. But then I have yet to hear a tv commentator who understands statistics or the concept of randomness. Whether it is the nonsense of suggesting that if a winning lottery ticket has been sold from a particular location a new punter should buy from there; or rubbish about road accident or crime figures; or discussions of meaningless political polls (or polls in which cigarette smokers phone in); or understanding that climate change analysis is based on long term trends, not cold days in February; or the risk of shark attacks; or the effects of flu injections; or the dangers of terrorist attacks, whatever the issue, the facts are not understood. Every single incident is treated as if it had equal meaning, when without the context that statistics provide they all equally lack meaning.

I know these people aren’t very smart, and I know the idea of tv is not to calm people’s fears but to increase them, so I understand why people are afraid of cars crashing through their living rooms; or catching an incurable disease; or having a meteorite fall out of the sky and crush them, stone dead. Good for ratings. But I don’t understand why Julia Gillard, certainly no fool, and not worried about the ratings of current affairs shows, can’t see the problem with the NAPLAN tests. If she really wanted to accurately compare student performance in order to see where government funding was most urgently needed it would be certainly possible to devise a scheme of random, unannounced, tests of schools which could give significant results. But that isn’t what she’s got, and no amount of bullying teachers can make it so.

She has more chance of winning a lottery. And so do disadvantaged schools.

Secret Millionaire

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by Education • Tags: , , , ,

I have a photo on my wall of my grandfather as a young boy. Full of promise he was, and with musical talent, and his mother bought him, somehow, a piano, and enrolled him for lessons. Then she died, when he was just ten, and his uncle, effectively head of the extended family, demanded that the lessons stop, they were inappropriate for a boy from a poor family, all he needed to know was enough to play hymns in church. Oh, and by the way, time he was out of school and into a job – he knew how to read and write didn't he? And that was that.

It was a common pattern in Victorian England, where there was a place for everyone and everyone was in their place. An education League Table. The noble rich had excellent schools like Eton and Harrow where they were taught how to stay rich and rule the Empire while being prepared for respectable seconds at Oxford. The middle class with aspirations could try the flogging shop schools described by Dickens in Nicholas Nickleby, but it wouldn't change their rank at all. The poor had, at best, a village school where for a very few years they would learn, from an unqualified teacher, their times table and alphabet and, perhaps, how to sign their name, but before you could say "Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write", and probably before their age had reached double figures, they were out of school and down the mines and into the factories. They needed education for nothing more than that.

Government or state schools were meant to change all that. To provide, in Australia, a quality education for rich and poor alike. To provide a chance for kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, or, for that matter, middle class backgrounds, to go as far educationally  as their abilities and desires would take them. Oh there would still be those who wanted to recreate Eton under southern skies, providing an old school tie for Australian Boardrooms; or ensuring that children had no alternative to the religious certainties of their family. But if that's what you wanted to do you paid for it, otherwise you were all welcome at the local public school.

Julia Gillard's league tables are going to take us back to Dickensian times. Poor schools will get poorer as students are pulled out of them, rich ones richer as Julia unaccountably pours money into them. Eventually children from poor families will give up, as my grandfather had to do.

Look, I think gathering information on performance (as long as that is what you are really measuring, which is a question for another day) of schools is fine. There are many public schools in poor city areas and poor regional areas who have struggled for years as conservative and then Labor governments have pulled money out. Compounding the problems by naming and shaming them isn't something I thought I would ever see a Labor minister do though. Why couldn't Julia keep the results to herself? Keep them secret. But then turn up at a school, disguised perhaps as a teacher's aide, and suddenly announce herself as the secret millionaire who was going to write out a big cheque for the struggling school that had been trying so hard. Not rest content until every public school in Australia was equal on the level playing fields of Eton.

Come on Julia, I'll help you with the disguise.

All David Horton's earlier writing is here.